HOMO
DEFECTUS
Having
walked out of one millenium into the next,
an
illegal immigrant crossing the border,
an
alien wearing the desert for a watch,
the
nights are no darker, the mornings no more
unforgivably
beatific. As before and before
and
before the days go by,
jaded
ambulances and women I will never know,
though
I come on like a freshly painted crosswalk
with
two virgin passports
and
a green card to pick lettuce on the moon.
Eschatologically
deranged,
I
was prepared for a big change
that
no one else would notice, not the debt-collecting goons
of Apocalypse and Armageddon
that
show up at the door
to
break your kneecaps like fortune-cookies
if
you’re not homeless by tomorrow, not
the
rotten needlepoint of those old dooms,
but
something with stars and grass and wild water
a
bag of pot, wine, cigarettes and a woman beside me,
midnight
at noon, charging the air
with
the sexual wyrd of her approaching eclipse.
I
thought, what the fuck, everyone’s entitled
to
a soft sundial
in
the available dimension of the future
even
if it’s de rigeur to cultivate the bleak,
and
who knows, I might start a trend.
Let
no one divulge the improbability of a dream.
Now
I’m eleven years into the twenty-first century
and
my heart is a nightwatchman in a morgue
looking
for a flashlight in the dark,
trying
to keep the light on long enough
to
see if I can recognize anyone.
There
are more ways than one to get home,
or
so I tell myself leaving the solar system
like
a space probe
into
the indigo realms of the open,
packed
with symbols and curios
that
might pass for signs of intelligence
should
I meet a sphinx.
I’m
grounded in the emptiness,
a seed on the wind with nowhere to root.
And
though I may have unfolded like a flower
in
the radiance of the sun,
I
was dropped from a bridge
into
a river that has no banks
by
the hand of a faithless lover.
Exiled
by exiles into exploration
I
keep sending back pixels and poems,
postcards
from the edge of nowhere,
but
I don’t know if anyone is listening
as
the earth recedes
to
the perfect point of a vertex
and
disappears among the stars.
And
it’s not that I’m running away, it’s just
that
oblivion is sometimes a means
of
keeping things in perspective
as
I proceed deeper into these dwarfing spaces,
an
ambassador with a suicide note
from
a self-destructive planet
screaming
out for attention. Contact.
A
universe we can panic into caring,
something
astounding
that
knows how to love
in
a way we couldn’t manage, a brilliance
that
doesn’t horde armies in the shadows,
an
enlightenment that isn’t a growlight in a closet.
But
do forgive the voyeurism of my longing
for
something better than I left,
there
are no echoes here
and
no one burns a candle in the window,
or
slips a tormented apology under the door
to
heal the wound of my departure
with
the sin-eating maggots
of
beautiful lies. Not to rehearse
old
catastrophes on a revolving stage in modern dress,
the
litany of horrors on the playbill,
or
waltz with the heavy velvet
of
theatre curtains at a gala of crude beginnings in a mosh-pit,
the
metaphors all elbows and bullies,
and
the music, the head-banging metronomic mania
of
amplified crustaceans, a swan-song for Nazis,
but
the history of our encyclopedic species
is
still the unholy shriek
of
a cosmic ape in an abattoir and our indifference,
the
universal background radio hiss
of
the big bang reduced to a whimper,
the
white noise that attunes this cacophony
of
crime and folly and war to our stupefied silence.
I’ve
been gone for such a long time, tell me,
are
the gas-chambers empty, do we still
turn
humans into soap
to
wash the blood from our hands, have
the
concentration camps been closed in the off-season,
do
the children still drink from sewers
and
play hide and seek
in
a garden of ripening land-mines,
the
stumps of their arms and legs,
the
Venus de Milos and Apollo Belevederes
of
savaged dolls? Is hunger
still
the direction of prayer for millions,
and
disease the fly that shadows them?
How
is it with the rich man and the poor?
Is
the daughter of one
still
the whore of the other
in
charity matinees for medicated mothers?
Does
dawn still prime the ghosts
in
the mass graves of empty wallets?
Are
the young still free
to
find their way in the world like roadkill,
or
has ignorance squared the circle at last
and
turned the corner on depravity?
Do
the corporations still own the rain in Bolivia,
and
patents pending on the genes
of
hybrid animals, logos and slumlords
in
the ghettos of gravity? Tell me,
before
I mistake a garbage barge
for
an island in the distance,
are
the budgets of small countries
still
awarded to movie stars and athletes
for
a trivial excellence
while
seventy-five million people die of AIDS
in
the next five years of global warming
and
there’s a young genius
with
a cure and an answer
dying
of cancer in front of a firing squad?
Do
the teen-agers in Bagdhad
still
draw the contagion out
with
a poultice of explosives
while
adolescents on ecstasy in L.A.
desiccate
their spinal fluids
in
a Roman orgy of wheelchairs?
Are
the redneck rap-stars of rural Perth,
the
‘wanna be’ pimps with faces like cow-pies
still
sharing infected needles
behind
the empty foodbank?
Has
anything been settled?
Are
the generals satisfied
and
the purse-snatching governments
weary
of stealing from their own?
Is
there a school
that
doesn’t drink spit from another man’s mouth
for
anyone with a mind, a science
that
isn’t the bitch of money and power,
a
religion that doesn’t teach a child to cower,
an
art that isn’t the atrocity of the hour?
Look
me straight in the eye
like
a satellite or the Hubble scope or Houston
and
tell me has anything changed
with
the falling of these first few grains,
the
last eleven years of my dwindling out
in
the new era of the hourglass? Are the old
still
wise alone behind a wasted windowpane
and
experience an ore the fools cannot refine?
Are
children taught to crave
before
they learn to give
and
the trees of the city still in concrete and chains?
Are
the cruel romanced
and
the gentle scorned, the best
belittled,
and the least exalted?
Are
there old men in the park
trying
to stare themselves to death
and
five hundred chemicals in the very next breath,
is
the sky a cataract, the rain a poison tear,
the
earth, contaminated real estate?
When
we turned the page
of
the voluminous century
to
read on in search
of
indubitable proof
of
our renewable virginity
were
the hundred million people
we
killed in the last saeculum
of
our genocidal curriculum
somewhere
in the footnotes?
But
you needn’t answer that.
I’m
only talking to myself
in
this huge, mute, brutal place
where
the earth isn’t even a microbe
and
time is defied by the enormity of space
that
lies before me like an ancient future
that
has already happened here and now
faster
than light
and
disappeared without a trace
a
waterbird, or the shadow of something in the night,
or
a flame the fire gave to the wind,
or
the name of someone written in sand,
who
tried to understand
the long disgrace of the human race
through
years of rage and tears,
and
sent out like a dove to look for land,
epochs
of blood in the murderous starmud,
buried
his face in the valley of his hands
where
he used to pray for deliverance,
and
nothing to say that would make a difference
left, unmanned.
PATRICK
WHITE
